Google pads small-business toolbox with purchase of website builder

By nabbing up Appetas, a company that gives restauratuers a way to build a website in minutes, Google appears to be diving deeper into small business. The culinary outfit announced the acquisition on its blog, along with the news that it would be shuttering the service to get to work on its "new endeavors." Co-founders Curtis Fonger and Keller Smith note that the folks in Mountain View are looking to bring easy-to-use business tools to merchants, but as you might expect, there's no mention of what that might entail. Appetas not only serves up Squarespace-esque design tools, but it offers GrubHub, OpenTable and social integration for key features -- like managing reservations. "We're very excited to use what we've learned with Appetas to create something even better at Google," they wrote in the blog post. Of course, Google purchased Zagat and its crowd-sourced reviews back in 2011, so we'll have to wait and see if it and this offering are paired together in future services. And there's Google+, which could be ripe for a transition to business directory now that its status is in limbo.